About Meeting of Angels
Meeting of Angels is a collaborative studio album by sitarist Nishat Khan and the early music vocal ensemble Gilles Binchois, directed by Dominique Vellard. The album merges North Indian classical music with Gregorian chant, exploring intersections between sacred traditions from the Indian subcontinent and medieval European liturgy.
Khan and Gilles Binchois released the album in 1996 under the Italian label Amiata Records. The recording adopted a CD format and featured nine tracks that alternated between Gregorian intonations and solo sitar performances. The project emerged from a live collaboration initiated in the mid-1990s, though the exact recording location and production details remain undocumented in widely accessible sources.
The tracklist opens with Alleluia - Pascha nostrum, a Gregorian chant for Easter, followed by the Introit - Dominus illuminatio mea, drawn from the liturgy for the Feast of the Dedication of a Church. The ensemble performs additional chants including Introit - Statuit ei Dominus, Graduel - Bonum est confiteri Domino, and Offertorium Domine, in auxilium meum, all rendered in the monophonic style characteristic of the Gilles Binchois repertoire. Khan contributes a solo sitar composition, Raag Bhairavi: A Raag Played at Dawn of the Morning, positioned centrally in the sequence. The album concludes with Alleluia - Excita Domine, potentiam tuam and Introit - Tibi dixit cor meum.
Critics noted the album’s fusion of raga-based improvisation with the modal structures of Gregorian chant, though specific reception details and commercial performance figures are not publicly archived. The collaboration marked one of Khan’s early forays into cross-cultural musical dialogue, while Gilles Binchois expanded their exploration of non-Western interactions with medieval sacred music. No subsequent live performances or reissues of the album have been confirmed in available records.